There are two main reasons that can keep ads from showing up. First, your campaign budget may have run out for the day. This can easily happen early in the day if you have a small daily budget (e.g. $10 a day) and you have high bids. Second, Google doesn’t show most ads all the time. Your search engine impression share or the percentage of the time your ad shows, will be higher if your budget and bids are relatively high compared to your competitors.

If you’re interested in seeing what your paid ads look like and where they appear in the results, use the Google AdWords Ad Preview Tool. This tool allows you to Google keywords and place yourself in certain locations so you can see what is showing up in the paid, as well as organic results, in real-time.

Benefits of this tool include:

Your data will not be skewed from impressions you create when searching for your ad.

Your search results won’t be biased by what Google remembers about you! Your email, IP, and other signals are telling Google what to show you based on your behavior. This tool eliminates that.

You can emulate the search results from different locations. You can put yourself in any market from Houston, TX, or Amityville, NY, and see how your ads appear in each.

You can see ads in both mobile and desktop formats. You can see how your ads appear on different devices.

To use this tool, visit: https://adwords.google.com/apt/AdPreview and enter the information you want to search. You should be able to see what is actually showing up for your results without any other factors contributing to the view.